JERRY WOLKOFF BLOG-IN LOVING MEMORY OF MY SON STEVEN NATHANIEL WOLKOFF, MY FATHER SAMUEL WOLKOFF, AND ALL THE OTHER VICTIMS OF INJUSTICE, EVIL IN THIS WORLD.THEY DIMINISH YOUR RIGHTS,THEN THEY DIMINISH YOUR EXISTENCE, THEN THEY LIE ABOUT IT, SAY YOU NEVER EXISTED, AND THE PROBLEM IS PEOPLE FORGET THE SUFFERING THAT LASTS FOREVER, NEVER KNOW THE TRUTH BY WHOSE HANDS, OR HOW YOU WERE KILLED.

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

The government of the United States has always portrayed our Country as the "land of the free" and a model of democracy at its best.Those of us who have had personal involvement with various parts of our government have known for a long time that our so called democracy is a fraud.For many decades our government under both Democratic and Republican Administrations has perpetuated the concept that we the people are who they serve and that the Constitution is the rule of the land.In reality the opposite has been true. We the people have been spoon fed lies about the things that government chooses to tell us, while they hide the truths of what actually happens .The recent Edward Snowdon (CLICK HERE) and Aaron Swartz cases (CLICK HERE) clearly show what happens to citizens of our Country who expose the truth. They are either harassed to death, labeled as traitors, and crucified by the sheep known as the media. At best, government represents a risk to the people it rules.Even
under a tightly written constitution and popular vigilance both of
which are easier to imagine than to achieve, government officials will
always have the incentive and opportunity to push the limits and loosen
the constraints.But if their purpose is to protect us, why worry?

SEE ME, HEAR ME, TOUCH ME

Taking one example such as recent revelation detailing the spying on all Americans who use any form of electronic communication, the government has told us that it is only tracking “metadata” such as the time and place of the calls, and not the actual content of the calls.C'mon, are we really that stupid? Does anyone actually believe what the government says, that they can be trusted with protecting our freedoms and our privacy? Technology experts say that “metadata” can be more revealing than the content of your actual phone calls.For example, the ACLU notes:

The “who,” “when” and “how frequently” of communications are often more revealing than what is said or written. Calls between a reporter and a government whistle blower, for example, may reveal a relationship that can be incriminating all on its own.

Repeated calls to Alcoholics Anonymous, hot lines for gay teens, abortion clinics or a gambling bookie may tell you all you need to know about a person’s problems. If a politician were revealed to have repeatedly called a phone sex hot line
after 2:00 a.m., no one would need to know what was said on the call
before drawing conclusions. In addition sophisticated data-mining
technologies have compounded the privacy implications by allowing the
government to analyze terabytes of metadata and reveal far more details
about a person’s life than ever before.

What [government officials] are trying to say is that
disclosure of metadata—the details about phone calls, without the actual
voice—isn’t a big deal, not something for Americans to get upset about
if the government knows. Let’s take a closer look at what they are
saying:

They know you rang a phone sex service at 2:24 am and spoke for 18 minutes. But they don’t know what you talked about.

They know you called the suicide prevention hot line from the Golden Gate Bridge. But the topic of the call remains a secret.

They know you spoke with an HIV testing service, then your doctor, then your health insurance company in the same hour. But they don’t know what was discussed.

They know you received a call from the local NRA
office while it was having a campaign against gun legislation, and then
called your senators and congressional representatives immediately
after. But the content of those calls remains safe from government
intrusion.

They know you called a gynecologist, spoke for a half hour, and then called the local Planned Parenthood‘s number later that day. But nobody knows what you spoke about.

Sorry, your phone records also known as a the supposedly benign phrase “metadata" can reveal a lot
more about the content of your calls than the government is implying.

Metadata provides enough context to know some of the most intimate
details of your lives. And the government has given no assurances that
this data will never be correlated with other easily obtained data.

“When you take all those records of who’s communicating with who, you can build social networks and communities for everyone in the world,” mathematician and NSA whistle-blower
William Binney — “one of the best analysts in history,” who left the
agency in 2001 amid privacy concerns — told Daily Intelligencer. “And
when you marry it up with the content,” which he is convinced the NSA is
collecting as well, “you have leverage against everybody in the
country.”

“You are unique in the world,” Binney explained, based on the
identifying attributes of the machines you use. “If I want to know who’s
in the tea party, I can put together the metadata and see who’s
communicating with who. I can construct the network of the tea party. If
I want to pass that data to the IRS, then I can do that. That’s the
danger here.”

At The New Yorker, Jane Mayer quoted mathematician and engineer Susan Landau’s hypothetical: “For example, she said, in the world of business, a pattern of phone calls from key executives can reveal impending corporate takeovers. Personal phone calls can also reveal sensitive medical information: ‘You can see a call to a gynecologist, and then a call to an oncologist, and then a call to close family members.’” [Landau gives a more detailed explanation here.]

“There’s a lot you can infer,” Binney continued. “If you’re calling a physician and he’s a heart specialist, you can infer someone is having heart problems.
It’s all in the databases.” The data, he said, is “all compiled by
code. The software does it all from the beginning — they have dossiers
of everyone in the country. That’s done automatically. When you want to
investigate or target somebody, a human becomes involved.”

“The public doesn’t understand,” Landau told Mayer. “It’s much more intrusive than content.”

The information collected on the AP [in the recent
scandal regarding the government spying on reporters] was telephony
metadata: precisely what the court order against Verizon shows is being
collected by the NSA on millions of Americans every day.Discussing the use of GPS data collected from mobile phones, an appellate court noted that even location information on its own could reveal a person’s secrets: “A person who knows all of another’s travels can
deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at
the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical
treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups,” it read, “and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”

The ACLU filed a declaration by
Princeton Computer Science Prof. Edward Felten to support its quest for
a preliminary injunction in that lawsuit. Felten, a former technical
director of the Federal Trade Commission, has testified to Congress
several times on technology issues, and he explained why “metadata”
really is a big deal.There are already programs that make it easy for law enforcement and
intelligence agencies to analyze such data, like IBM’s Analyst’s
Notebook. IBM offers courses on how to use Analyst’s Notebook to understand call data better.

Unlike the actual contents of calls and e-mails, the metadata about
those calls often can’t be hidden. And it can be incredibly
revealing, sometimes more so than the actual content.

Knowing who you’re calling reveals information that isn’t supposed to
be public. Inspectors general at nearly every federal agency, including
the NSA, “have hot lines through which misconduct, waste, and fraud can
be reported.” Hot lines exist for people who suffer from addictions to
alcohol, drugs, or gambling; for victims of rape and domestic violence;
and for people considering suicide.

Text messages can measure donations to churches, to Planned Parenthood, or to a particular political candidate.

Felten points out what should be obvious to those arguing “it’s just
metadata”—the most important piece of information in these situations is
the recipient of the call.The metadata gets more powerful as you collect it in bulk. For
instance, showing a call to a bookie means a surveillance target
probably made a bet. But “analysis of metadata over time could
reveal that the target has a gambling problem, particularly if the call
records also reveal a number of calls made to payday loan services.”

The data can even reveal the most intimate details about people’s romantic lives. Felten writes:

Consider the following hypothetical example: A young
woman calls her gynecologist; then immediately calls her mother; then a
man who, during the past few months, she had repeatedly spoken to on the
telephone after 11pm; followed by a call to a family planning center
that also offers abortions. A likely storyline emerges that would not be
as evident by examining the record of a single telephone call.

With a five-year database of telephony data, these patterns can be
evinced with “even the most basic analytic techniques,” he notes.

By collecting data from the ACLU in particular, the government could
identify the “John Does” in the organization’s lawsuits that have John
Doe plaintiffs. They could expose litigation strategy by revealing that
the ACLU was calling registered sex offenders, or parents of students of
color in a particular school district, or people linked to a protest
movement.

Indeed, the government’s spying on our metadata violates our right to freedom of expression, guaranteed by numerous laws and charters
including the U.S. Constitution, the European Convention on Human
Rights, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and international
law, including articles 20 and 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, and Conventions 87 and 98 of the International Labor
Organization.Remember, a U.S. federal judge found that the statute allowing indefinite detention of Americans without due process has a “chilling effect” on free speech. Top reporters have said that they are less likely to interview controversial people, for fear of being accused of “supporting” terrorists.

A former FBI agent and bomb technician pleaded guilty
to leaking classified information to the Associated Press about a
successful CIA operation in Yemen. As it turns out, phone metadata was
the key to finding him.The real reason the government is going after leakers is because it
can. Investigators today have greater access to phone records and
e-mails than they did before Obama took office, allowing them to follow
digital data trails straight to the source.In a highly controversial move, investigators secretly obtained a subpoena for phone records of AP reporters and editors.

Once investigators looked at that phone metadata, they got their big break in the case.It’s no wonder that the Obama administration is so aggressive in punishing leakers
so often. Metadata is the closest thing to a smoking gun that they’re
likely to have, absent a wiretap or a copy of an email in which the
source is clearly seen giving a reporter classified information.If you’re looking for a case study in the power of metadata,this is a perfect example.

Top experts have said that mass surveillance sets up the technological framework allowing for “turnkey tyranny”.Spying on Americans’ metadata destroys our constitutional right to
freedom of association and virtually everything the Founding Fathers
fought for.Computer experts have used an analogy to explain how powerful
metadata is: the English monarchy could have stopped the Founding
Fathers in their tracks if they only possessed “metadata” regarding which colonist talked to whom.I don't think the kind of society most of us want, one in which we assume a government official is looking over our shoulders?Democracy deserted our Nation along time ago, simply mouthing the brain washed, hollow words that we are a free Country is a meaningless illusion, a big lie, because the actions of our government tell the ugly truth about how little freedom we actually have.

Search This Blog

Translate

About Me

By accessing this Blog, a web browser (hereafter user) consents that she/he is familiar with, understands and absolutely accepts the following blog disclaimer:
This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed on this Blog are my own, not those of any one else.
While I try and make this blog as accurate to my life as possible some things are deliberately left out or censored by me, and as such my postings are not to be considered in any way a viable method for judging my character, or for any other purposes, doing so will be considered an infringement of my rights. Where possible any infringement of my rights will be pursued using applicable points of law.
All trademarks, service marks, collective marks, design rights, personality rights, copyrights, registered names, mottos, logos, avatars, insignias and marks used or cited by this Blog are the property of their respective owners and this Blog in no way accepts any responsibility for an infringement on anyone of the above.